Dear Anti-Saddle Seat People, You Need to Calm Down

It needed to be saud so tysm

THIS.

I used to have an American Saddlebred Pleasure Horse and he wore pads and weighted shoes because to even be noticed, your horse had to have some action. For those who think EVERYONE with a high-stepping horse sores their animals and put fish hooks in the horse's frog, we did NOT to those things. Tennessee Walking Horse people do a lot of that to get that "big lick," and we were not trying to get that in our Saddlebred. To me, the so-called "big-lick" is ugly, and obviously hard to "sit" because a lot of riders of TW Horses have to lean forward in the saddle, and ride toes down, feet back. Therefore, another characteristic of different tack on TW horses is the cutback saddle with a much higher cantle (back of saddle) than cutback saddles used on Saddlebreds, Morgans, and Arabians. That's to keep the rider from sliding off the back end of a back-end long-striding gait as if the high tail also would not hold the rider on the horse. Yet, when I was training on a state job, this woman harassed me all day long about my Saddlebred and accusing me of using elevator shoes, fishhooks and chains to sore my horse to get the "big lick." I told her twenty times if I didn't tell her fifty times, our horse was a Saddlebred Pleasure horse and didn't have any more than two pads on his front feet and weighted shoes, and nothing under the pad to stab the frog to make him step higher, and we didn't use chains. Besides that, the big lick is a TW horse thing, not Saddlebreds. but to this bully woman, they were one and the same. Had we not been on the job, I would have belted her one.

I went from hating this discipline associating it with Big Lick (as most people who hate saddle seat) to loving this discipline more than any other. I'd kill to get to ride saddle seat. There is no discipline in the world that is perfect and without flaw, and there will always be bad people in any group, but saddle seat gets way too much hate and misunderstanding for what it is. Training a horse to move the same way under saddle as they are naturally bred to move in the wild is the basis of Dressage, but when its applied to the natural high stepping trot of a saddlebred or arab or morgan etc, people get all worked up over it thinking its abuse. Its certainly no more unnatural than making a horse jump or spin or race barrels.

it had to be said 🤷🏼‍♀️